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Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Welcome to my stop on the Virtual
Book Tour, presented by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours, for The Beautiful
American by Jeanne Mackin. Please leave a comment or question for Jeanne
to let her know you stopped by. You can
enter her tour wide giveaway, where Jeanne will be awarding a paperback copy of
her book to a randomly chosen winner, by filling out the entry form below. You can follow all of the stops on his tour
by clicking on the banner above or following the schedule below. The more stops
you visit, the better your odds of winning.

As recovery from World War II
begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern
France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she
unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous
model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war
unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the
Vichy regime may have cost her daughter’s life. Lee suffers from what she
witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi
concentration camps.

Nora and Lee knew each other
in the heady days of late 1920’s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her
childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray,
and Lee’s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of
famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her
friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children
in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will
Nora’s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals, and break
years of silence?

A novel of freedom and
frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the
extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional woman.

EXCERPT

Two days later we were in Paris, unpacked in a
flea bag hotel on Isle de la Cite, and the fleas were worth it, because outside
my attic window was Notre Dame Cathedral.

Maybe it was all those bottles of French perfume,
or my father who after a fourth shot of gin would whisper to me, We'll go to
Paris one day, just you and me. One of
Lee's friends told me, a year after I had arrived, about reincarnation and how
people traveled to get to where they had once been happy in some other
life. Whatever the cause, I was
immediately happy in Paris, more buoyant and optimistic than I had ever been in
my life. It was like stepping out of a
closed dark room and into the fresh air.

Paris was cheaper than London, and even if Jamie
did not find a gallery and make money from sales, his allowance would cover us,
if we lived frugally. We could go to
bars and cafes for meals and drinks, spend our afternoons walking along the
Seine, Jamie always pointing his camera in some direction.

We walked the cobblestone streets of the Latin
Quarter, peered through grilled gates at private courtyards with their playing
fountains and flower-filled urns. We
picnicked in the Luxembourg gardens where the writer Hemingway had hunted
pigeons for his lunch. We spent a week's
worth of cash at the Folies Bergere to see Josephine Baker dance in her banana
skirt...Josephine, whose favorite fragrance was jasmine, the flower that gave
the name to the new music, jazz. We ate sugar crepes from street stalls, and
walked up and down rue de Fleurus, hoping to get a glance of Gertrude Stein.

PRAISE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN

“Will transport you to expat
Paris.” – Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist

“From Poughkeepsie to Paris,
from the razzmatazz of the twenties to the turmoil of World War Two and the
perfume factories of Grasse, Mackin draws you into the world of expatriate
artists and photographers and tells a story of love, betrayal, survival and
friendship…an engaging and unforgettable novel” – Renee Rosen, author Doll Face

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeanne Mackin’s novel, The Beautiful American (New American Library),
based on the life of photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller, received
the 2014 CNY award for fiction. Her other novels include A Lady of Good Family,
about gilded age personality Beatrix Farrand, The Sweet By and By, about
nineteenth century spiritualist Maggie Fox, Dreams of Empire set in Napoleonic
Egypt, The Queen’s War, about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and The Frenchwoman, set in
revolutionary France and the Pennsylvania wilderness.

Jeanne Mackin is also the
author of the Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers (Cornell University
publications) and co-editor of The Book of Love (W.W. Norton.) She was the
recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the AmericanAntiquarian
Society and a keynote speaker for The Dickens Fellowship. Her work in
journalism won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of
Education, in Washington, D.C. She has taught or conducted workshops in
Pennsylvania, Hawaii and at Goddard College in Vermont.

A
Francophile and lover of historical novels set during World War II, I jumped at
the chance to read and review The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin, a
fictional tale of two women who travel to England and France from America at
the end of the Roaring Twenties. Using
two main characters to tell her story, one fictional and one real, Ms.
Mackin takes the reader on an emotional journey covering the topics of
women’s friendship, the changing role of women between the 1920’s – 1950’s and
the ugliness of war. If you’ve never
read a book by Jeanne Mackin, this would be a fabulous start.

Ms.
Mackin
does an excellent job introducing the reader to her two main characters right
from the start. A fictional character,
Nora Tours, an American woman living in France during World War II, is
searching for her sixteen year old daughter, Dahlia, when she encounters Lee
Miller, a famous model turned professional photographer, who is both an acquaintance
and one time friend from her past. As
the reader is introduced to both characters it’s clear their history is fraught
with emotional angst, betrayal and a friendship forged in their shared past in Poughkeepsie,
New York. As we get to know both Nora
and Lee, it’s clear that while Nora is the more likeable character, Lee is the
one history will remember.

Using
flashbacks to tell the story of both women as they arrive in London and
eventually move to Paris with the men they love, we learn about life in France
between the wars and how art, money and society interacted. A striking woman who was not ashamed of her
body, Lee Miller becomes a famous model and with her lover, Man Ray, a famous
visual artist, lives a life whose goal appears to be the acquisition of more
fame. Which is offset by how Nora’s life
is more focused on those around her and the dreams she has for a home and a
family. As the war approaches and the
situation between the two women takes them on different paths, along with a
touch of betrayal on Lee’s part, we watch the two women struggle to survive in
a rapidly changing world.

A
gifted historical researcher, Ms. Mackin doesn’t shield her
characters, or the reader, from the horrors of the war and what these women
encountered. As “The Beautiful American”,
we watch as Lee becomes a photographer and reporter for Vogue during the war
whose pictures covered events including the London Blitz, the Liberation of
Paris, and the horrors of the concentration camps at Bacherwald and
Dachau. The author also covers the
violence that women suffered on a more personal and physical nature. Ms. Mackin’s writing style and form
of prose make it easy to get drawn and lost in her story as we watch both women
survive the war.

Will
Nora locate her missing daughter? Will
Nora and Lee find a way to get beyond the past and forge a new and lasting
friendship? And how will Lee Miller’s stories and photographs of the war impact
society? You’ll have to read The Beautiful
American to find out, I enjoyed it and look forward to reading more
of Ms.
Mackin’s work.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Crowns

GIVEAWAY

To enter to win a paperback
copy of The Beautiful American, please enter via the GLEAM form
below.

Rules

– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm
EST on October 2nd. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open to US residents only.
– Only one entry per household.
– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any
suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and
entrants may be disqualified at our discretion
– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

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